More kitty cat drama. Let's take a look. Spoilers ahead.
Galestar and Stripestar are both Clan leaders who fall madly in love. They declare that their respective Clans, WindClan and ThunderClan, should unite into a new group called StormClan. StormClan soon finds that they can't find their footing in the forest territories, so they travel far in hopes of finding a new home. But this journey will put everyone, especially Galestar and Stripestar, to the test. Will they survive and prosper?
Mid book. Just very mid. I will admit I didn't dislike this one quite as much as I did with some of the other recent Super Editions, such as Leopardstar's Honor, Onestar's Confession or Riverstar's Home. This is mostly due to those books being rather uninspired and recycling a lot of already tired-out ideas. StormClan's story, while still not that interesting to me, at least is a new concept we haven't seen before (except for some explanations in Ivypool's Heart).
However, it's still not great. For one, this is yet another boring traveling book in a long line of boring traveling books in this series. By now you'd really think the Erins would stop doing these since they're so widely disliked, but they keep doing this type of plot again and again and it rarely ever works.
I also thought Stripestar was a rather unlikable character to follow. That aside, in general barely any of the characters in this book left an impact on me. Which is especially bad when some of these cats start dying in death scenes that are clearly supposed to be tragic, but I legit didn't care because I didn't know these characters. Why should I care if cats like Kestrelwing, Mudsplash and Rosebush bite the dust if I barely know these characters to begin with? They had like one or two traits to them at most, they weren't fully fledged and rounded characters.
The only characters in this I genuinely kinda vibed with are Galestar/Gale Rise and Tinyclaw. I don't know, I felt that they were the most well-written and likable out of the entire cat here. Especially Gale Rise goes through a neat arc and I really liked her getting her happy ending. Bound Hunt, while also not amazing or anything, was still a rather likable cat.
However, if I do have to compliment the book for one other thing outside of Gale Rise and Tinyclaw, it will be the relationship between Galestar and Stripestar. Is this a good relationship? In the end, no, and even earlier on there were signs it wasn't going to work out. But I do compliment it because this overall felt like one of the more well-written and realistic relationships in Warriors. It's got a lot of ups, a lot of downs, both personalities clash from time to time (and more so as the story goes on), it just felt, well, realistic. It isn't some kind of boring true love, nor is it an entirely negative relationship with only lots of arguing. It just felt realistic and seeing Stripestar and Galestar grow apart eventually just felt natural with how their relationship progressed. So I will give the story props for a well-written and realistic central relationship.
Not a great book by any means, but I didn't outright hate it either. It just sits perfectly in that awkward middle of "okay, this has some good elements and some bad ones". Decide for yourself whether you check this one out or not. I'm not going to recommend it, but at the same time it's not terrible, either.
Rating: 3/5
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